We're an Irish-owned, Irish-run, family business — and in kitesurfing and wing foiling, that's genuinely rare. Off the top of my head, the only other outfit I can think of doing the same thing is Ryan Coote at Wind and Wave Ireland. Nearly everyone else selling this gear in Ireland is a distributor for a bigger international operation, or a satellite of a shop based somewhere else. We're not. This is us, in Barna, and it always has been.
We ride everything we sell. Every kite, wing, board and wetsuit in the shop has been out on the water with one of us — usually at Silverstrand or Rusheen Bay, in the same wind and the same cold you'll be riding in. We're constantly trying to bring the best deals we can to the west coast, not because it's a slogan, but because we live here and we want more people out on the water with us.
There's research that backs up why that matters beyond just us. The New Economics Foundation's work on local economic multipliers found that money spent with a local business generates roughly five times more value for the local economy than the same money spent with an out-of-area chain. It stays here, gets re-spent here, and keeps other small businesses around Galway going too — which is part of why we try to support the other local operators around us rather than just compete with them for scraps.
Here's something worth saying plainly, because it comes up more than you'd think. People approach our small local shop asking for a discount when our margins are already incredibly tight. We do our absolute best to compete with the market, but we will never be able to compete with the goliaths — the big international retailers buying container-loads at a scale we simply can't match. And if you rang one of the manufacturers directly and asked for their "best price" or "lowest price," they wouldn't even respond. Pricing isn't the fight we're built to win, and we'd rather be upfront about that than pretend otherwise.
What we can give you instead is everything a big online retailer can't. A local experience — somewhere to actually stand with the gear, hold it, try it on, and talk to someone who's ridden it. We deal with warranty and manufacturer issues on your behalf, rather than leaving you to fight it out with a company on the other side of Europe. We live and work in this community — you'll see us on the water, not just behind a screen, and we run community events to get more people out riding, not just buying. And it's my name on the shop. That's not a small thing to me. It means I personally answer for every piece of gear we sell and every lesson we teach.
We want to look after our own — the people who ride with us, and the west coast more broadly. That's the same reason we put together a list of the other local businesses we work with and support; we'd rather grow this community than just compete inside it.
None of that would count for much if the gear itself wasn't good. Everything we stock is premium kit, chosen because it stands up to the Wild Atlantic Way — proper Atlantic wind, cold water, salt, and the kind of conditions that expose cheap gear fast. We don't stock anything we wouldn't ride ourselves in a west of Ireland winter.
So if you've been buying online from somewhere you've never spoken to, or a big retailer that's never seen the west coast, we'd genuinely love the chance to earn your business instead — even if it's just a chat about what you need before you decide where to buy it. These days we run a mobile trailer out of Silverstrand, and all our stock is online, so the best way to reach us is a WhatsApp message. No pressure, just an honest conversation from people who actually ride this stuff.
